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Neel Burton - Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking (Ataraxia Book 5)

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Book:
Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking (Ataraxia Book 5)
Author:
Neel Burton
Publisher:
Acheron Press
Genre:
Books / Home and family
Year:
2019
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Sharpen your mind, reframe your perspectives, and unleash your full human potential.

RD Laing presented madness as a voyage of discovery that could open out onto a free state of higher consciousness, or hypersanity. But if there is such a thing as hypersanity, then mere sanity is not all its cracked up to be, a state of dormancy and dullness with less vital potential even than madness. We could all go mad, in a way we already are, minus the promise. But what if there was another route to hypersanity, one which, compared to madness, was less fearsome, less dangerous, and less damaging? What if, as well as a backdoor way, there was also a royal road strewn with petals and sprayed with perfume?

This is a book about thinking, which, astonishingly, is barely taught in formal education. Our culture mostly equates thinking with logical reasoning, and the first few chapters examine logic, reason, their forms, and their flaws, starting with the basics of argumentation. But thinking is also about much more than logical reasoning, and so the book broadens out to examine concepts such as intelligence, knowledge, and truth, and alternative forms of cognition that our culture tends to overlook and underplay, including intuition, emotion, and imagination.

If Hypersanity fails to live up to its tall promise, it should at least make you into a better thinker. And so you can approach the book as an opportunity to hone your thinking skills, which, in the end, are going to be far more important to your impact and wellbeing than any facts that you could ever learn. As BF Skinner once put it, Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.

Burton guides the reader to unlearn, rediscover, and return to wholeness. It is a journey out of Platos caveThe International Review of Books

Ive read many Neel Burton books. Hes a wonderful writer and able to immerse you lightly in pretty heavy stuff.Adrian Bailey, Vine Voice

There is more golden wisdom flowing from these pages than can be explained in an overview ... Highly recommended.Grady Harp, Amazon.com Top 100 reviewer

What an intriguing book! It truly is a book that makes you think about thinking ... You will understand not only your own thinking better but also the thinking of others who matter in your world.Jamie Bee, Amazon.com Top 50 Reviewer

Burton is never short of an interesting and sharp judgment.Prof Peter Toohey, Psychology Today

About the author

Dr Neel Burton is a psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine-lover who lives and teaches in Oxford, England. He is a Fellow of Green-Templeton College in the University of Oxford, and the recipient of the Society of Authors Richard Asher Prize, the British Medical Associations Young Authors Award, the Medical Journalists Association Open Book Award, and a Best in the World Gourmand Award. His work has featured in the likes of Aeon, the Spectator, and the Times, and been translated into several languages.

Contents

Introduction

1. Arguments

2. Fallacies

3. Questions

4. Answers

5. Enemies

6. Rhetoric

7. Language

8. Languages

9. Reason

10. Intelligence

11. Knowledge

12. Memory

13. Science

14. Magic

15. Truth

16. Intuition

17. Wisdom

18. Inspiration

19. Insight

20. Emotion

21. Music

22. Imagination

Final Words

Grab your copy now and prepare to be thoroughly challenged!

Neel Burton: author's other books

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HYPERSANITY

THINKING BEYOND
THINKING

There are essentially three types of people: those who love life more than they fear it, those who fear life more than they love it, and those who have no clue what Im talking about.

HYPERSANITY

THINKING BEYOND
THINKING

NEEL BURTON

Acheron Press 2019

Published by Acheron Press

Contents

Introduction

H ypersanity, or perhaps super-sanity, is not a common or accepted term. But neither did I make it up.

I first came across the word while training in psychiatry, in the Politics of Experience by RD Laing. In this book, first published in 1967, Laing presented madness as a voyage of discovery that could open out onto a free state of higher consciousness, or hypersanity. For Laing, the descent into madness could lead to a reckoning, to an awakening, to breakthrough rather than breakdown.

A few months later, I read CG Jungs autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections , which provided a case in point. In 1913, on the eve of the Great War, Jung broke off his close friendship with Freud, and spent the next few years in a troubled state of mind that led him to a confrontation with the unconscious.

As Europe tore itself apart, Jung gained first-hand experience of psychotic material in which he found a matrix of mythopic imagination which has vanished from our rational age. Like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Heracles, Orpheus, and Aeneas before him, he travelled deep down into an abyssal underworld where he conversed with Salome, an attractive young woman, and with Philemon, an old man with a white beard and the wings of a kingfisher. Although Salome and Philemon were products of his unconscious, they had lives of their own and said things that he had not previously thought. In Philemon, Jung had at long last found the father-figure that both Freud and his own father had failed to be. More than that, Philemon was a guru, and prefigured what Jung himself was later to become: the wise old man of Zrich. As the war burnt out, Jung re-emerged into sanity, and considered that he had found in his madness the prima materia for a lifetimes work.

The Laingian concept of hypersanity, though modern, has ancient roots. Once, upon being asked to name the most beautiful of all things, Diogenes the Cynic (d. 323 BC ) replied parrhesia , which in Ancient Greek means something like free speech or full expression. Diogenes used to stroll around Athens in broad daylight brandishing an ignited lamp. Whenever curious people stopped to ask what he was doing, he would reply, I am just looking for a human beinginsinuating that the people of Athens were not living up to, or even aware of, their full human potential.

Figure 1: Diogenes looking for a human being.

After being exiled from his native Sinope for having defaced its coinage, Diogenes immigrated to Athens, took up the life of a beggar, and made it his mission to metaphorically deface the coinage of custom and convention, which, he maintained, was the false currency of morality. He disdained the need for conventional shelter or any other such dainties and elected to live in a tub and survive on a diet of onions. Diogenes proved to the later satisfaction of the Stoics that happiness has nothing whatever to do with a persons material circumstances, and held that human beings had much to learn from studying the simplicity and artlessness of dogs, which, unlike human beings, had not complicated every simple gift of the gods. The term cynic derives from the Greek kynikos , which is the adjective of kyon or dog. Once, upon being challenged for masturbating in the marketplace, Diogenes replied, If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly. When asked, on another occasion, where he came from, he replied, I am a citizen of the world ( cosmopolites ), a radical claim at the time and the first recorded use of the term cosmopolitan. As Diogenes approached death, he asked for his mortal remains to be thrown outside the city walls for wild animals to feast upon. After his death in the city of Corinth, the Corinthians erected to his glory a pillar surmounted by a dog of Parian marble.

Both psychosis and hypersanity place us outside society, making us seem mad to the mainstream. Both states attract a heady mixture of fear and fascination. But whereas mental disorder is distressing and disabling, hypersanity is liberating and empowering.

After reading the Politics of Experience , the concept of hypersanity stuck in my mind, not least as something that I might aspire to for myself. But if there is such a thing as hypersanity, the implication is that mere sanity is not all its cracked up to be, a state of dormancy and dullness with less vital potential even than madness. This I think is most apparent in peoples frequently suboptimalif not frankly inappropriateresponses, both verbal and behavioural, to the world around them.

For Laing,

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of ones mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

It is certainly true that most normal people, myself included, make very limited and uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous use of their intellectual and human potential. It is not just that we are irrational but that we lack scope and range, as though we had grown into the prisoners of our arbitrary lives, locked up in our own dark and narrow subjectivity. Unable to take leave of our selves, we hardly look around us, barely see beauty and possibility, rarely contemplate the bigger pictureand all, ultimately, for fear of losing our selves, of breaking down, of going mad, using one form of extreme subjectivity to defend against another, as life, mysterious, magical life, passes us by.

We could all go mad, in a way we already are, minus the promise. But what if there was another route to hypersanity, one which, compared to madness, was less fearsome, less dangerous, and less damaging? What if, as well as a backdoor way, there was also a royal road strewn with petals and sprayed with perfume?

But, as I have intimated, thinking is also about much more than logical reasoning, and so the book broadens out to examine concepts such as intelligence, knowledge, and truth, and alternative forms of cognition that our culture tends to overlook and underplay, including intuition, emotion, and imagination.

Hypersanity was never going to be an easy romp, but I have tried to be as clear and concise and relevant as possible in an effort to keep the book open to the broadest readership. The chapters are ordered in a loose progression, building up to a radical conclusion (please dont peek), but can, if you prefer, also stand by themselves. If the book fails to live up to its tall promise, it should at least make you into a better thinkeras writing it did me.

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